An awkward exploration of contemporary multiculturalism.
Odhiambo's (The Reverend's Apprentice, 2008) new novel explores life in a vaguely located Canadian resort town on the Pacific coast called Ogweyo Cove.
A German-Canadian journalist named Kerstin Ostheim is preparing to marry P.J. Banner, a photographer who is torn between the worlds of his white father and his Indigenous mother. Meanwhile, Kerstin's trans daughter, Schuld, struggles with society's prejudice against her identity. She has two comforts—her art and her boyfriend, Woloff, a Kenyan Olympic athlete who is trying to regain his confidence after his career has come to a premature end. Further afield, Kerstin's father is running for another term as governor (of what, we are never told), while P.J.'s father succumbs to health problems triggered by his stressful business dealings. This novel is told in a clumsy present tense, with prose that sometimes borders on nonsensical ("Sirens bray down wind between the present and future perfect, and out of place in the sensible order of things they hate for real"). Readers may detect a faint plot regarding a spate of mysterious horse killings that Kerstin and P.J. decide to investigate, but it is perfunctory at best; the novel never seems very interested in solving that mystery. Mostly, Odhiambo cycles between characters, presenting episodes from their pasts while neglecting to investigate how these episodes inform the complexity of their relationships in the present. Despite the present tense, few events feel urgent or weighty, so that most of the narrative proceeds in an abstracted haze. When Woloff and Schuld are assailed in a supermarket by an angry man, for instance, the story seems to be building toward some kind of crisis, but it's a false alarm; the happy couple merely sidesteps the aggressor and goes back to Woloff's house to "get lit." The same sense of abstraction plagues the setting: Place names and cultural references are maddeningly unspecific, making it difficult for readers to feel absorbed in the story. This novel wants to wrestle with heavy issues of identity, history, and the legacy of European colonialism, but its vague setting, ill-defined cultural references, and psychologically flat characters render these insights flimsy.
An awkward exploration of contemporary multiculturalism.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77166-423-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Bookthug
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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